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What is the best way to add files to a website on a LAMP Server?

I have installed lamp on Ubuntu 12.04.

I try to access /var/www but it doesn't allow me to do anything as it says I don't have permissions.

I have tried:

1.

gksudo nautilus - which works but its very inconvenient way of doing things.

2.

sudo adduser ryan www-data

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

sudo chmod g+rw /var/www

The above didn't work.

I have googled and searched this site for a solution, but all the existing possible solutions have not worked.